Tag Archives: Outlook

Our corporate email recently upgraded to Office365 and one of the many benefits which has come with this is the ability to preview an Out of Office message from a colleague before sending them a mail from Outlook. I think this is great.

Only today I was talking to a colleague who was complaining that when they went on holiday they’d receive lots of messages from colleagues asking for information or requesting work to be done and on their return from leave they didn’t know what had been dealt with.

Traditionally you may only find out a colleague is away after the email has been sent and the Out-of-Office has bounced back. Now it’s possible to find out before hitting send and (if appropriate) send the email to someone else instead. Not only does the request stand more chance of being dealt with promptly but also the person on leave comes back to a shorter inbox.

If, like me, you use your email archive as a record of what’s happened and if, like mine, this means your email box is approaching capacity, here’s a trick that might free up some space.

In Microsoft Outlook (with an Exchange/ Office365 back end) the attachments are stored in your mailbox. Quite often I find I want to keep the content of the mail for posterity, but I don’t need the attachment- for example when I email a document to someone and have the original stored safely elsewhere.

In Outlook 2013 it’s possible to remove just the attachment, leaving the mailbox intact. To do this, locate the email in your mailbox, right-click on the attachment and choose “Remove Attachment” from the context menu.

You will be prompted to confirm this, and doing so will remove the attachment but keep the message.

When using Outlook 2013, the Calendar conveniently displays the current weather and temperature at the top of the pane. The location can be switched using the drop down on the weather itself (for some reason my English-UK Office setup decided that I was most likely a New Yorker following installation) but changing from Fahrenheit to Celsius is not as obvious.